Section I. the Promise of Reconstruction

Section I. The Promise of Reconstruction 8 A. Overview of Reconstruction in South Carolina The United States was a deeply transformed nation after the Civil War. The four-year conflict had resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men and cost millions of dollars in destruction. It left in its wake a ravaged landscape and a weary people. Yet, from such devastation also came hope. Enslaved African Americans throughout the South were emancipated as Union military forces invaded southern territory and defeated Confederate armies. After the war ended in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment permanently abolished slavery, guaranteeing freedom to roughly four million African Americans who, just four years earlier, could only dream of it. Even though many of the political and economic gains these newly freed men and women achieved would be systematically revoked during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they succeeded in creating “an autonomous black social and cultural life, which…ranked among the most enduring accomplishments of Reconstruction.” They enjoyed a newfound ability to “pursue their own agenda,” free of white claims to corporal ownership and all the limits those claims had placed upon them. They engaged in activities which unmistakably demonstrated their freedom: forming independent communities and institutions, educating themselves, working towards economic independence, owning land and property, and exercising political rights. Illustrative of African-American perceptions of freedom, their endeavors embodied the hopes and promises of the era. 1 Organizing themselves into structured communities was of the first order for freed men and women throughout the South. The establishment of a stable family life became the basis of these communities, though just bringing together families proved difficult for many African Americans. The process frequently involved searching for family members who had been separated from each other during enslavement, either from slave sales or trades. These searches usually ended in disappointment, but sometimes they were successful. African Americans also focused on “liberating their families from the authority of whites.” The harsh conditions of enslavement along with the constant threat of separation had placed considerable strain on familial ties. Secondary to the authority of white slaveholders was the parental authority of black fathers and mothers, which was undermined and devalued during slavery. With freedom, African Americans hoped to rebuild these values and emphasize the centrality of family life to the black community. 2 The development of independent black churches further strengthened black communities. Although many white churches allowed African Americans to worship with white parishioners during Reconstruction, they still relegated black parishioners to a second-class status. Across the board, African Americans therefore withdrew from biracial congregations to establish their own churches, which soon dotted the landscape of the South. Churches became the only institution where African Americans could truly feel free from white control. They not only served as places for African Americans to practice their faith, but they also were social centers for local 1 John C. Rodrigue, “Black Agency after Slavery” in Thomas J. Brown, ed., Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 40. 2 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 87- 88. 9 communities. The ministers of these churches likewise became post-war black leaders. They mobilized entire communities to offer charitable services to the neediest African Americans. Orphanages, soup kitchens, employment agencies, and relief funds were just a few services that 3 promised self-help from within the black community. African-American church built by its members. Formed in 1867 after 108 black parishioners withdrew from a biracial congregation, this church was typical of efforts to establish separate African-American churches. Courtesy of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . Freed men and women also considered education imperative to collective self-improvement. They associated the ability to read and write with freedom because white southerners had denied them access to education during slavery. As soon as they received the chance, African Americans established private schools for themselves and their children in any available facility. They packed classrooms full of eager students and placed those adults with the most formal schooling at the front of the class as teachers. Similar to ministers, teachers were considered leaders who often played multiple roles within the black community. For example, a teacher might be asked to mediate the sale of a farmer’s crops or to serve on a county board. Specific reasons why black southerners wanted an education were usually intertwined with the issues they faced in everyday life—they might want to become literate so they could read the Bible or they might feel it was necessary to master basic arithmetic in order not to be cheated out of money when they took their crops to market. In part due to education’s clear implications for collective self-improvement, many white southerners refused to financially support black schools. As a result, many of these schools were forced to run on private funds or seek aid from the federal government; however, white opposition hardly caused African Americans to lose their appetite for education. Just five years into Reconstruction, they spent an astounding one million dollars on education. Efforts to sustain their schools were supported to a large degree by the federal 3 Foner, Reconstruction , 88-96. For more on the separation of black and white churches, see Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 10 government, which spent more than five million dollars on black education within that same 4 timeframe. A crowded classroom in South Carolina. African-American families enthusiastically enrolled their children at local schoolhouses during Reconstruction. Educating a child was an economic sacrifice for many parents, who needed the child to take care of younger siblings or work on the family farm. Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress . Just as freed men and women established independent churches and schools, so they maintained a separate social sphere from white southerners. Of course, these separate spheres were not impermeable. They often came into contact, requiring blacks and whites to interact in various daily situations. Once freed, however, African Americans tried to remain independent of whites to the best of their ability. 5 The creation of separate spheres arose mostly out of black attempts to escape the social and labor relations of the old plantation system. Fundamental to African-American concepts of freedom was the understanding that they would no longer toil under white authority. Black southerners attempted to reject any form of labor that resembled working on plantations. They interpreted their newfound freedom to mean that they could set the conditions of their own labor and avoided entering into labor contracts, such as sharecropping, with whites. Black southerners even shunned cash crops, such as cotton, which still carried memories of enslavement. Although 4 Foner, Reconstruction , 96-98; Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Negro Education: A Study of the Private and Higher Schools for Colored People in the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1916), 289. For more on black education, see James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). 5 For more discussion on the construction of separate social spheres, see John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 91-92; Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black- White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 47-48. 11 white southerners often misconstrued their refusal to work under white management as “indolence” or “laziness,” African Americans simply desired to farm their own fields for their own subsistence. And although some black southerners emigrated to the North or moved closer to urban areas for better economic—and often educational—opportunities, the vast majority remained in the rural South, farming their own land where possible. In South Carolina, for instance, seventy-seven percent of blacks worked in agriculture by the end of Reconstruction. 6 Farmers in the field. Families needed all members to help on their farms in order to keep them running. This often meant that children had to forego their education during the harvest and planting seasons. Courtesy of the Charleston Museum . Goals of self-employment were ideological and not economically feasible in the long term for most African Americans. Many had to enter into some sort of contractual agreement with white southerners, sometimes their former owners, in order to find land and work. Throughout South Carolina's coastal lowcountry, for instance, “a labor renting system” emerged, “whereby freedpeople agreed to work two or three days a week for a landlord in exchange for ‘the right to reside on and cultivate particular

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